In 2017, Alessio Natalizia made an interesting claim about the brusque, intelligent dance music he was making as Not Waving: “We live in such a fucked-up world, so it’s important to make some optimistic music once in a while,” he said. “I think it’s our job as an artist to give options, to give possibilities, and a different way of doing things. And I think hope is one of those options.”
Fans could’ve been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Natalizia’s music at that point in time was imposing and brutalist, more reflective of a “fucked-up world” than any avenue out. The key song from Good Luck, the album he was then promoting, was a team-up with Québécoise nihilist Marie Davidson, whose own brand of coldwave doubles as anti-club manifesto. “Hope” seemed at best like a far-off prospect, at worst a cruel joke.
A few years and a few records later, the truth of Natalizia’s statement is coming into view. On How to Leave Your Body—roughly his 10th record, including collaborations with Romance and Mark Lanegan under his Dark Mark moniker—Natalizia triumphantly and effusively embraces optimism, thawing out his trademark industrial chill underneath a hard-earned sunrise. Less an EBM album than a showcase of the best textures contemporary experimental pop has to offer, How to Leave Your Body offers a counterweight to modern doomsaying, choosing instead to celebrate the fragility and strangeness of the human experience with uncommon earnestness.
One early highlight, and the song that most embodies the album’s ethos, is another collaboration with Davidson. “Hold On” acts as an inversion of 2017’s “Where Are We”: Where once Davidson decried the “sick world we live in,” now she hangs back, an omniscient narrator extolling the power and importance of friendship, or perhaps simply recalling fond memories. “Teenagers walk hand-in-hand, smiling in the daylight,” she says quietly, with none of her trademark smirk. “Someone rents a car and they drive; they laugh as they all jump in, getting closer and closer to each other.” Portentous piano chords and ravey synth stabs build as she speaks; the scene feels cinematic, a surprising turn toward narrative that foreshadows the album’s thoughtful, sanguine bent. As the song crests, Davidson breaks into a rare sung chorus: “Every now and then I feel a fire in my heart/I hold on to the feeling trying not to fall apart.”
The rest of the record is charged with this earnest, nostalgic warmth—even its song titles, including “You Are Always Younger Than the Future” and “My Best Is Good Enough,” look like a catalog of affirmations. “My Sway,” a collaboration with HTRK’s Jonnine, is lyric poetry as clattering, organic dembow, an appeal to a lover to see eye-to-eye that builds to a crescendo that, if not hopeful, is at least resolute and empowered in its finality: “It could only be this way/I see in a different light/Your morning, my night.” Natalizia even pulls Lanegan from under his perpetual dark cloud on “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2,” a meditation on grief underscored by droning, atonal strings. “Daylight is going, it is coming,” Lanegan repeats, a gentle mantra for recognizing the inevitability of death, but also of life.
If How to Leave Your Body were made up exclusively of metaphysical meditations it might have dragged, but Natalizia has always been a skilful craftsman of albums. Serene songs like “My Sway” and “Last Time Leaving Home Part 2” balance the slivers of industrial house and techno that arise elsewhere, while the stuttering synth grooves of “Define Normal” and the haunted echoes of Spivak collaboration “Never Ready” make the return to more subdued, pop-oriented tracks feel like a refreshing step out of the club into fresh air and sunlight. The whole of How to Leave Your Body feels like a step towards something brighter, kinder, better. It makes hope seem not just like a possibility, but something tangible, accessible—something so physical and so real that, if you wanted it, all you’d need to do was to reach out and grab it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.